While Gogol, Russia’s master of circumlocution and hyperbole, and Pushkin, the rational romantic, are apparently dichotomous in many ways, both share the singular distinction of forming the foundation of 19th and 20th century literature in Russia and beyond. Distinctly different in various ways, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin also, however, share many similarities, e.g., authorial digressions where views of the narrator/author are expressed, social commentaries, descriptive passages, and a pervading sense of poshlust.
Vladimir Nabokov, in his essay “Our Mr. Chichikov,” defines poshlust as “cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue, high flautin’, in bad taste.” This is displayed by both authors: Chichikov himself could almost be the archetype of poshlust, while described as a pseudo-golden mean, “not handsome, but neither was he particularly bad looking; he was neither too fat, nor too thin; he could not be said to be old, but he was not too young, either,” Chichikov reaches to the pinnacles of pretension and fatuousness. All of the other characters in Dead Souls are also victims of poshlust, each of them a distorted characiture of some, at least to Gogol, execrable human quality: Manilov is a sugary do-nothing, Sobakevich is a lumbering glutton, Nozdryov is the gambler/cheat/liar, Natasya Petrovna Korobochka is the knit-picking land-owner described as a “silly old woman,” et cetera. Pushkin’s portrayal of poshlust is the most evident in Linsky, the air-assuming, Germanified romantic. Onegin, melancholy and reposed in his own world, and especially Olga, capricious and fickle, are themselves characters of poshlust. The only character that seems to escape poshlust, at least internally, is Tatyana.
Both Gogol and Pushkin comment on social aspects of life; while Gogol’s vision is wholly within his prodigious imagination, both writers show a particular disdain for the socially contracted and perpetuated poshlust. The authors’ views of society could probably be represented in the whimsical Olga: flitting around between lavish compliment, dexterous dance partners, and the granting of favors; no sincerity, prudence, or even truth mare the social worlds of Gogol and Pushkin. The Ladies of N. in Dead Souls personify the decadence of poshlust in that they are intrinsically external, i.e. comme il faut is the ruler of their lives, they are the “ever so refined” part of the human species. Not that the men are really any better — they are not. It is Gogol’s portrayal of women, especially the “lady agreeable in all respects” and the “simply agreeable lady,” that condemn then to perpetuity in poshlust.
Each writer was a master of his respective idiom. Reading Gogol can be likened to riding in his troika when he himself has laid the road. He, with intricately detailed descriptions, can take one anywhere in his imaginative jaunt through Russia. Only occasionally cutting through the surface in his digressions, Gogol is really the master of irrelevant, non-sequitur description. Pushkin’s digressions are more philosophic, sometimes waxing nostalgic, observations about life than minute detail. He addresses sundry topics, from excessive pride to comme il faut, from spring days lost in youth to “Just let yourself be the whole care.”
The consequences of poshlust are evident. For Gogol poshlust is the troika that carries those afflicted through their lives. They talk and breathe, yet never think and act. They are monomanics who care about one thing: the collection of dead souls, eating, being obsequious, et cetera. Gogol’s characters, as colourful as they are only exist in the absence of life. Death is the inevitable outcome of poshlust in Pushkin. At the poem’s conclusion Linsky is worm fodder, Onegin is heading in that direction, and Tatyana, even though her loyalty is admirable, she has sacrificed her happiness to live to be true to a man she doesn’t love. Probably, these books relate, we all are victims of poshlust on the troika to the grave.
